I am so mad I could just scream. I didn't know it was possible to pack so many lies into a 5 minute radio report, but Mara Liasson surpassed my expectations of how much false beltway villager conventional wisdom she could deliver per minute of airtime.
Where to begin.
- She allowed Frank Donatelli (repiglican operative)to outright lie about Obama's (un)popularity. He said Obama's unpopularity gives repiglicans a significant opening. In fact, as DKos members can see every Friday, Obama is at about the same popularity as the % of votes he got over a year ago, somewhere around 54%. So Obama is more popular than unpopular.
- Where was the Democratic operative to provide balance to this repiglican partisan falsehood. She could have at least pointed to some actual data to support or refute the claim, but that would look too much like journalism.
- While the Donatelli is correct that the high unemployment and slow economic growth exists, Liasson allows him to associate this with Obama when a majority of people as shown by recent polls attribute most of the economic problems as the legacy of the Bush administration. But pointing this out would be too hard on the repiglican guest.
- Liasson repeatedly refers to Tuesday's repiglican wins in governor's races in NJ and VA (ignoring that these races hinge much more on local than national issues), but doesn't even mention that the dems won on tuesday CA and now have a LARGER majority in the House as a result of the election, because of the loss in NY. I guess in the beltway village, the is great news for repiglicans. She didn't even mention that NY 23 hasn't be held by a democrat since the civil war!
- In not even mentioning the CA election, she also omitted that this district actually elected Garamendi. a more progressive, pro healthcare reform, Democrat than the centerist Democrat (Tauscher)in what philly2philly described as a "center right district" More from this site...
Tauscher had served since 1996 and ran as part of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. She supported right wing causes such as rolling back the estate tax, tightening bankruptcy rules and expanding free trade agreements. After the 2006 Democratic takeover of the house, she warned her colleagues not to run "over the left cliff" by passing liberal legislation.
Garamendi is not that. He’s an unabashed liberal. While he supports a public option in the health bill before congress, he has also stated he’d support a single-payer health system as well as creating an exit strategy for the quagmire in Afghanistan. He won by 10 points.
- Liasson's final words...Next year's election will be a very difficult one for the Democrats...ie losing 2 federal off year elections, one in a district that has been Republican for 160 years and increasing the democratic majority in congress is great news for repiglicans.